Retailers, authors and publishers often share a common goal of encouraging users to purchase works that the authors have created. For instance, a book store, an author of a book and a publisher of the author all strive to successfully market and sell the book to a wide audience of consumers. Unfortunately, these actors rarely act together in unison to achieve this common goal. Instead, authors simply write the book and, once the publisher publishes the book, may market the book by conducting a book tour or the like. Retailers, meanwhile, simply receive shipments of the book from the publisher and advertise the book at the store (in the case of brick-and-mortar retailers) or online (in the case of retailers operating websites).
While these traditional relationships between retailers, authors and publishers have proven fruitful to a certain extent, deeper relationships amongst this group of actors may prove even more abundant.